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Apr 24, 2018

SCOTUSblog Summary Of Lucia Oral Argument

     Ronald Munn, a law professor at Columbia, has written a summary for SCOTUSblog of yesterday's Supreme Court oral argument in Lucia v. SEC on the issue of whether Administrative Law Judges, at least at the Securities and Exchange Commission, are constitutional. Here are some excerpts:
... Although the argument ranged broadly, four distinct threads provide a good overview. The first is sympathy for the development of an independent and merit-based civil-service system. Breyer, for example, plainly approached the case from the premise that the Constitution could accommodate that system. ...
More expansively, Justice Elena Kagan seemed viscerally sensitive to the importance of maintaining the independence of adjudicators from political influence. ...
A second thread, almost diametrically opposed to the first, is evident in the emphatic view of Roberts that the APA’s [Administrative Procedure Act's] effort to “insulat[e]” judges from the elected executive derogates directly from the Constitution’s requirement of accountability. ...
A third thread noted the odd circumstances of the challenge to this particular group of appointments, which argues that the existing judges were unduly biased despite the civil-service methodology of their appointment. It seemed troublesome both to Kagan and to Justice Anthony Kennedy that a shift to appointment by the commission itself would, if anything, produce judges who were even less independent than the judges that Lucia challenges. ...
If that summary captured the entire argument, I might have expected a strong majority to rule in favor of the existing appointments, perhaps with a dissent from Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. But to complete the picture I have to mention a fourth and final thread: the strong sense that the court’s prior decisions all but compel a ruling invalidating the challenged appointments. The basic point is that the activities of the officers here are similar to the activities considered by the Supreme Court in its 1991 decision in Freytag v. Commissioner, which held that “special tax judges” of the Tax Court qualified as officers for purposes of the appointments clause....
Even Kagan, who plainly shared Metlitsky’s concerns about fostering an independent civil service, found it hard to swallow Metlitsky’s attempt to distinguish Freytag. ...
I would, though, add two closing observations. First, the justices seem to view this as a case likely to have broad implications. Mark Perry (appearing on behalf of Lucia to challenge the appointments) tried repeatedly to limit the breadth of his argument to a small group of only 150 administrative law judges scattered around the federal government, suggesting that the court’s decision would apply only to cases of wholly adversarial adjudication – a group from which he pointedly tried to exclude Social Security adjudications. ...  Second, if any of my readers are thinking that the “originalist” camp is likely to accept these appointments, I would mention that the only comment of the often-voluble Gorsuch during the oral argument was a question about what the appropriate remedy would be if the existing appointments are held unconstitutional. ...
In sum, the defenders of the administrative state are not entirely out of the woods. Although some of the justices are sympathetic to the goals that motivate independent appointments, it is not at all clear that five of them will agree that those goals pass muster under the constitutional framework the court’s decisions establish.

7 comments:

  1. Do you really think the Court is going to let the Federal courts get flooded with what are now administrative hearings?

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  2. @5:55

    The challenge is to the constitutionality of the current appointment process of administrative judges, not the concept of having administrative judges.

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  3. 5:55 - I don't think that was ever an eventuality. Administrative hearings will continue to be held by ALJs or hearing examiners or whatever. The crux of the matter is whether ALJs were properly appointed and have MSPB removal protections, or whether they were improperly appointed and agency heads can hire/fire ALJs at will. If the latter, then APA protections for decisional independence goes out the window, and the Supreme Court would also have to answer whether decisions issued by wrongfully appointed ALJs can be ratified after the fact.

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  4. 9:25 - Really? That's your takeaway? Even SCOTUSblog said this could be one of the most important Supreme Court decisions of this term. The implications for civil service reform and independence under the APA is far-reaching. If the SC sides with the administration, ALJs can be fired at will. Paying too many cases - fired. Spending too much time actually reviewing the evidence - fired. The test the SC may articulate for for who is an inferior officer vs. employee can be extended to employees other than ALJs. Does the DDS claims reviewer have authority to bind the government if the decision is not appealed? Then he/she is an inferior officer and can be fired at will. Oh, and let's not forget the hundreds of thousands of decisions that may have to be re-opened if the ALJs were incorrectly appointed. Payments cut off because the favorable decision was invalid. These are all real possibilities that have been discussed with no clear answers.

    If this is your molehill, I'd love to see your mountain.

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  5. 12:14, I think the entire case is a farce and just something for people here to bloviate and comment on ad nauseam. Do you truly and completely remotely believe they are going to shut all this down? If so you are incompetent to practice law, even administrative law.

    Tempest in a tea cup.

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  6. If the inferior officer argument wins the day, will there be an argument to make it necessary to reclassify some ALJs to hearing officer? Is the ALJ job itself an inferior officer position because it involves the type of power and authority being argued. So, if you don’t really exercise that type of power and authority being argued in this case, should you really be considered and classified as an ALJ, or should you be reclassified as something else. In this instance a hearing officer.

    All ALJs have the same title but with some being labeled officers, because they actually do some kind of more significant work leads to two classes of ALJs. I’m not sure the APA drafters had this type of two kinds of ALJs structure in mind.

    I don’t know the answer to the question or whether its logically on point, but just putting it out there for discussion.

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